Mongolian women have taken to magazines like Cosmopolitan which has built up a circulation of 5,000 copies. Photo: AFP

Every time a new Mongolian-language edition of Cosmopolitan magazine is released, Tselmeg Erdenkhuu sits down with a friend to explore a monthly dose of Hollywood gossip, glitzy fashion and scintillating sex.

“They talk about sex a lot in this magazine, like what position is healthy or how to make men go crazy,” said the 28-year-old businesswoman, who is a single mother.

The titillating revelations are just part of a US media invasion of the once remote country, which has ridden a globalisation wave since shaking off communism two decades ago.

Mongolians are avid readers and the country’s litreacy rate is more than 97 per cent, a legacy of the Soviet-era education system which saw village boarding schools set up for nomads’ children.

Even in the vast nation’s distant grasslands herdsmen are to be found reading crumpled two-week-old newspapers inside their felt-covered yurts.

New opportunities

With its economy roaring on the back of a mining boom that fuelled an 11 per cent growth last year publishers now see opportunities from targeting newly wealthy Mongolians with premium-priced, Western-linked products.

Launched in December 2010, Cosmopolitan has built a circulation of 5,000 copies. National Geographic and, most recently, Playboy have since followed in its wake.

The US financial news agency Bloomberg set up a joint-venture television station in Ulan Bator in October, aimed at the city’s emerging financial kingpins and ordinary people looking for advice on what to do with their free government-issued shares in state-owned mining companies.

With the rapidly shifting economy, fast urbanisation, major infrastructure projects and environmental threats, the Mongolian-language National Geographic is also making an impact, despite its steep cover price of 20,000 tugrik (HK$111.60).

“Many people are concerned about nature and how it can be preserved while we simultaneously develop our economy,” said Khaliun Tseven-Ochir, the general manager of Irmuun, which publishes both National Geographicand Cosmopolitan.

“Through National Geographic we can influence our country’s leaders to avoid the mistakes that have been made in the past. Our readers expect us to raise these issues,” she added.

The Mongolian version of Playboy has also found its way to supermarket checkout stands, selling some 3,000 copies of the inaugural October edition.

Racy images of Kim Kardashian and Mongolian model Sarnai Saranchimeg were the primary selling points and for those who buy it for the articles, there were interviews with Ulan Bator mayor Bat-Uul Erdene and actor Jack Nicholson, plus a profile of the late Steve Jobs.

“Before we launched most people thought that Playboy is just porn. But we are challenging that perception with intellectual articles that will help keep our Mongolian men informed,” said editor-in-chief Bolormaa Natsagdorj.

Mongolia has 2.75 million people spread across an area half the size of India, and its media landscape is as wild as its physical one.

Raising standards

The new magazines compete with dozens of local publications, many of them trashy tabloids filled with sex scandals, soft porn and yellow journalism, often with unsourced facts.

Some owners of major daily newspapers – which do not do not reveal circulation figures, but are said to sell 5,000-8,000 copies – have family or friendship links to top politicians.

But the arrival of US media can only raise local reporting standards, said Khulan Jugder, a journalism instructor at the capital’s University of the Humanities.

“Mongolian media stations are all private and politicians own many of them. So they can’t inform in an unbiased way or make objective programmes,” she said.

Cosmopolitan and Playboy split about 50-50 between locally produced and US content, while National Geographic is mostly translated. About four hours a day of the Bloomberg television programming is local, and the rest translated from Hong Kong.

For now they are more emblematic of a social transformation that is already seeing young, upwardly mobile Mongolian women challenging traditional norms of dating, career choice and lifestyle.

Mongolia’s Minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism, Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, 46, seems to epitomise the changes. A Stanford graduate and one of nine female members of the country’s 76-seat parliament, the Great Hural, she has moved up the ranks of government with positive energy, a can-do attitude and an array of fashionable trouser suits.

Cosmopolitan “certainly helps our young ladies and girls gain confidence in themselves”, she said. “Women need to share their secrets of success, beauty and strength. Sisterhood is a natural need of every woman.”